Small change in Finland:
The MTV Katsomo online package has been discontinued (priced around € 95 last season, depending when you ordered it), and it has been replaced by a monthly subscription to all of MTV’s sport content that costs a whopping € 24,95/month. So for a season that lasts 9 months it’ll cost € 224.55 to watch F1 online this season. The F1 content on the channel(s) is the same as it has been for the previous two to three years, so there really isn’t any logical reason behind this increase in price (except to force more money out of customers).

(and just a reminder, the Finnish MTV is not “the” MTV aka Music Television)

Mercedes will continue to dominate, but Ferrari manages to challenge them quite often. The mid-field pecking order will vary from race to race, with Williams and Red Bull being in the hunt for the occasional podium every now and then. Both Force India and Toro Rosso have a few excellent races, but generally they’ll lack pace. McLaren has improved from last year, while Renault has taken a small step back.

The back of the grid is occupied by Sauber, Manor and Haas. Sauber may have a few good results in the beginning of the year, but they lack funds to develop their car properly. Manor is vastly improved from last year, but they are still too slow. Haas is yet another new team and will score no points this year.

A few names off the top of my head:
– Olivier Panis. Just go watch the first half of the 1997 season; he did challenge for the championship. Then came Canada and the crash that definitely slowed him down.
– Alexander Wurz. Shined on his debut while replacing Gerhard Berger, I feel like his career never quite took off.
– Heinz-Harald Frentzen. Two horrible years at Williams, then challenged for the championship in 1999, but never lived up to the hype he received during the Mercedes junior years (“Faster than Schumacher”).
– Nick Heidfeld. Had a solid career, but there seemed to always be just a bit more potential in him.
– Allan McNish. While he has been extremely successful outside F1, his career with Toyota was way too short (the same with Mika Salo).

There are a few races that have brought me to tears:
– 1995 Canadian GP. Never saw this live (didn’t follow F1 back then), but watching it some ten years later was still a very emotional event.
– 2000 Japanese GP. The disappointment of Mika losing the championship was so bitter.
– 2010 Abu Dhabi GP. Listening to Seb’s team radio has to make you feel at least something.

I suppose I get caught in the overall emotion of the event(s) rather than shedding a tear of joy for my favourite driver (I remember shouting and jumping up and down during Jere ’97 and Brazil ’07).

According to this interview (in Finnish), the artist and Mika Salo actually did not know each other before filming the first music video, but Arman Alizad asked Salo to appear in the clip, so he did.

Oh, and the other two guys on the phone in “Se ei mee niin” are Amin Asikainen, a former boxer and European champion, and Hans Välimäki, a celebrity chef. Strange that they could not find a third sport star to appear.

The graphics are definitely missing some features (like the previously mentioned chequered flag), but after one weekend, I do prefer their style over the previous one. Maybe my eyesight is bad (it is!), but I really like the clear and large font. However, I still do not like displaying the running order during the race only on the bottom of the screen. Every time I glance at it, the gap I wanted to see has usually just been displayed, and I have to wait further 30-odd seconds for it to come up again.

We might see an increase in track action over other weekends, but it will be rather minimal. If a driver would do some 600km of running during the weekend (300km in practice & qualifying and 300km in the race) which then would be distributed over the 19 other weekends, we get around 30km per weekend – some 6 laps around most circuits. Spread that further over practice sessions, and you’ll get 2 more laps per practice – small increase, but it might be hard to notice.

Business as usual on Finnish television. The pay-per-view channel MTV Max of course carried the race and it’s replay as usual, and the free-to-air highlights were shown on Sub as scheduled in the evening.

And MTV (not Music Television) showed some poor taste by showing Ratzenberger’s and Senna’s crashes on their evening sport news as part of a brief segment about F1 crashes/safety.

I live in Finland and yes, the drivers definitely have an impact on our ratings. Formula 1 used to be hugely popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, mostly due to Mika Häkkinen winning back-to-back world championships. Some of the races pulled up to 1.5 million viewers – that is a huge number for a country with just 5.5 million residents! However, F1 moved to pay-per-view in 2007, and the ratings naturally dropped like a stone. Even though Kimi won the championship that year, the F1 boom was over. I’m not sure if MTV (our broadcaster) publishes any exact figures, but a few years ago some statistic claimed that they had some 200,000 or 300,000 subscribers. But I’m pretty sure that even if F1 was to become free-to-air here, it would not pull over million viewers. The public simply does not care about the sport that much any more.

One of the things to keep in my is that the Finnish people love success. Basically it doesn’t matter what sport is happening, if a Finnish athlete or team is successful, people will watch it. Ice hockey is a good example of this: if Finland makes it to the finals of the world cup, the entire country goes insane. If the team drops out during the group stage, the finals do not interest the public. Another prime example was curling during the 2006 Winter Olympics: the Finnish team was rather successful, and the previously laughed at sport suddenly became the national sport, at least for a short period of time.

I suppose it could turn out like Bahrain: many people say the race should not take place, some do not comment, and Bernie plays down the whole debacle. And in the end the race goes on as normal, and a week afterwards no one remembers that there even was a political conflict.